DESI DISCOVERS!

June 30, 1974

BY BEN FALKE, Sunday Group Writer 

Who says they never come back? At 57 and in better physical condition than he’s been in for years, Desi Arnaz has finished a pilot which he hopes NBC will convert to a prime time series. 

The show is called “Dr. Domingo” and it’s about a doctor in a small northern California town who adds to his income by acting as the local coroner and medical examiner. 

"He’s a cross between Marcus Welby and Columbo,” says Arnaz gleefully.  If “Domingo” never makes it as a series, Arnaz has four or five other projects in his hopper more than enough to justify the rent on his office at Universal, just around the corner from Lucille Ball Productions. (1)

Desi, who invented television reruns and syndication of hit shows, feels he still has some contributions to make to the medium he did so much to shape 25 years ago. 

MENTION ARNAZ’ name and most people think first of “I Love Lucy,” those 180 merry half hours which, ever since they went into syndication, have been showing somewhere in the world virtually every hour of every day. A New York critic complained recently that one station in that city was showing “I Love Lucy” reruns five times a day! 

Those who remember TV credit lines also recall Arnaz as the producer and occasional director of “The Untouchables,” another series with gargantuan longevity. (2) Then there was “Desilu Playhouse,” a quality anthology series which introduced many top film and stage stars to the small screen. Not to mention shows like “December Bride,” “The Mothers-In-Law,” “Guestward-Ho,” and others whose ghosts still enliven daytime television. 

“I quit the business in 1960 because it got to be a monster,” Arnaz recalls now. (Actually, he says it “beez-ness” his Cuban accent still as thick as ever). 

“At the beginning, It was fun but when you art in charge of three studios, with 3,000 people and 35 sound stages working all the time, the fun is long gone." 

He and Lucy, after many stormy off-camera scenes, were newly divorced then, so Arnaz moved quietly out of Los Angeles to breed horses farther south, in Del Mar, and to fish and build a showplace hideaway house at Las Cruces in Baja California. He married again in 1967, to a non-show biz lady who shared his love of horses, and he even found time to teach a course in television at San Diego State College. (3)

DESPITE THE FACT that he is (he says) far from the multi-millionaire which all those reruns of "Lucy” and “The Untouchables” might lead you to suspect, Arnaz claims that it isn’t money pressure that’s bringing him back to work now. 

“I’m okay for money if I don’t live too long,“ he says with a chuckle. "The funny thing is that I never really cared that much about making money just for the sake of making money. I wanted to be able to take care of my family and to live well which I’ve done. The rest you never see anyway." 

What prompted this particular comeback was a call from MCA-Universal boss Lew Wasserman last Christmas. "Lew used to be my agent when I first came out to Hollywood in 1940,” Arnaz reminisces. “To show how low he was on the totem pole in those days, he used to pick me up at my house every morning and drive me to work and I was only making $1,500 a week! 

"But Lew called me last Christmas and said, ‘What are you going to do – play golf and fish for the rest of your life? Why not come to Universal and develop one show at a time? We’ll handle all of those administrative details that you hate you just concentrate on the creative end.’ 

"Well, that sounded very appealing. I already had the idea for ‘Dr. Domingo’ from an old paperback mystery that somebody left in our Baja house, and to tell the truth, I was beginning to miss show business. After all, I’ve been in it since I was 16!" 

SO NOW this onetime boy bongo player (4), bandleader and star of many a film musical before he and Lucy developed TV situation comedy, is back behind a producer’s desk. 

"Television comedy has changed a lot since we did ‘I Love Lucy,’” he admits. “I don’t think you could do a show like ‘Lucy’ now but some of the things we learned from doing it are still important. "You still have to have a viable premise, not only for the series as a whole but for each individual episode. 

"You also need a cast that works together to produce a kind of chemistry. The audience has to like them as people as well as characters in the show. 

"That’s where we were so lucky with ‘Lucy.’ I found Vivian Vance playing a prostitute in a play in La Jolla (5) and signed her up on the spot. Then I said to myself, ‘What have you done, you mad Cubano? Suppose Lucy doesn’t like her?’ Luckily, they got along splendidly from the start it could have been a disaster." 

How did he invent the rerun? 

"I didn’t do it on purpose, I swear,” he says jokingly. “I never even allowed reruns of ‘Lucy’ during the summer which was only 13 weeks in those days. But the reruns got started because we made the big decision to do the show on film instead of doing it live the first time anybody had thought of it. 

"They wanted us to do the show live in New York in front of an audience. Lucy works best in front of people. But we didn’t want to move to New York; we had just bought a new house and we liked it in California. 

"When CBS bought the show, they gave us a total budget of $19,500 a week –  you can’t even hiccup on television for that now. I said to them, ‘Let us film the show in California, that way you’ll have a much better quality print… and we can stay here.’  

"They wanted to know how much more it would cost that way; I had no idea so I picked a number out of the air – $5,000 more a week. Now Lucy and I had been getting $5,000 a week between us, plus 50 percent of all rights in the show. 

"CBS came back and said okay, they’d give us the extra $5,000 if we would take a salary cut to $4,000 a week. Again out of the blue, I said, ‘Okay but then we have to own 100 percent of the show’ never thinking they’d say yes. But they agreed, and we wound up owning everything." 

ASIDE FROM such show business triumphs, Arnaz gets most pleasure from talking about his family his daughter Lucie, and son Desi Jr. 

Desi Jr. began his film career with "Red Sky at Morning”; his latest picture is “Billy Two-Hats.” (6)

“I always’ knew Desi would make’ it,” his father says now, “but Lucie was always so stiff and shy when we brought her on the show that I thought she’d be a teacher or something. I never dreamed she’d want to act. But she has just landed the lead role in the touring company of ‘Seesaw,’ so big things could be happening for her, too.” (7)

Arnaz is currently putting his life together into a book, for which he reportedly is getting a $125,000 advance. (8) Despite the stormy scenes he and Lucy used to have when they were married, he says it won’t say anything bad about his former wife, co-star and business partner. 

“We’re friends now,” he insists. “We gave a little family party for young Desi on his 21st birthday last year. I looked over at the two kids standing together and said to Lucy, ‘If we never did anything else, that makes it all worthwhile.’ And she agreed.”

#   #   #

FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

(1) “Doctor Domingo” did not become a series.  The character was introduced on an episode of “Ironside” titled “Riddle at 24,000″ as a ‘backdoor’ pilot.  It aired March 14, 1974. 

(2) Desi was never credited as director of any episodes of “The Untouchables”. That doesn’t mean he didn’t step in or assist, as he did on some episodes of “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”, but he was never credited. 

(3) On March 2, 1963, Desi married Edith Eyre Skimming Mack Hirsch aka Edie in Las Vegas, Nevada. The remained married until her death in 1985, just a year and a half before Arnaz’s passing. 

(4) Conga drums, not bongos. This is a frequent error by journalists. 

(5) Vivian Vance was appearing in the 1943 John Van Druten play “The Voice of the Turtle” at La Jolla Playhouse. Vance had also appeared in the play in the mid-1940s when she had a nervous breakdown, and had to leave the cast.  She played Olive Lashbrooke, described as “a promiscuous, worldly girl, questioning the practicality of the lessons in chastity she received as a child and wondering if she is alone in her passion.”  Vance, who had Broadway credits, did not appear in the Broadway production. When the film was made, Olive was played by Eve Arden.  Vance acted opposite KT Stevens, who played Mrs. O’Brien (the new tenant plotting to ‘blow up the capitol’) on “I Love Lucy.”  In some productions, Hayden Rorke (Mr. O’Brien) also appeared in the play. 

(6) Red Sky at Morning was released in May 1971. Desi Arnaz Jr. won a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer, Male. His character was named Billy…

Billy was also his character name in Billy Two Hats, released in March 1974. 

(7) Lucie Arnaz has stated that she never appeared on “I Love Lucy.”  Desi is probably referring to her early appearances on “The Lucy Show” as Cynthia, a character seldom seen but often spoken about.  From Hartford in April 1974 to Los Angeles in September 1974, Lucie toured the Broadway musical Seesaw to a dozen cities with John Gavin and Tommy Tune. 

(8) Desi Arnaz’s autobiography was titled A Book.  It was first published in 1976 by Warner Books. It covers Desi’s life up until 1960.  In 2018, an audiobook was released read by Juan Pablo Di Pace.